Multilingual extension of temporal expression recognition using parallel corpora

This paper presents the automatic extension of TERSEO to other languages, a knowledge-based system for the recognition and normalization of temporal expressions, originally developed for Spanish. TERSEO was extended to English and Italian through the automatic translation of the temporal expressions, and it was presented in previous works (see Saquete et al. (2004a)), but a new methodology has been designed with the purpose of obtaining better results in this issue. This new methodology is based on the use of parallel corpora for extending the TERSEO temporal model to other languages. In this case, two different methods have been tested: (1) automatic translation of TERSEO patterns to other languages and (2) automatic corpora annotation in the target side of parallel corpora. The main idea is focused on annotating the Spanish side of a parallel corpora, projecting the analysis to the second language, and then obtaining new TERSEO patterns (1) and new annotated corpus (2). The set of new patterns will be used to improve the current TERSEO language independent modules. Whereas the new annotated corpus will be used to train a ML system. This system will annotate new temporal expressions in the new language.This work has been suported by the Generalitat Valenciana throught the research grant BFPI06/182 and the project GV06/028 (Tratamiento bilingüe Valenciano-Castellano de preguntas temporales complejas en los sistemas de búsqueda de respuestas), the Spanish Ministery of Science and Technology (project TIN2006-15265-C06-01: TEXT-MESS - Knowledge discovery and Representation in Human Language Technology) and the European Union (project FP6-IST-2005-33860: QALL-ME - Question answering learning technologies in a multilingual and multimodal environment)